Spring RTS Engine

Felix the Cat wrote:Oh, OK.

Let's get rid of all TA content and then brand ourselves as TA 2 then

AF wrote:Argh! You should be careful talking about PS3 game rips here, you forget who i work for ;D

This whole thing has been discussed before. We know what needs doing and that installer change was going to happen anyway, I and other have been nattering on about it for years now.

The developers have the means to settle this, but the necessary steps have not been taken or the interest shown. Stuff like implementing physical requirement of the TA cd. It would be unpopular with those people accustomed to having their cake and eating it, but if thats ignored the developers would get away with it, people would make a crack and we would have plausible deniability.

was going to happen anyway

error: TobiMisinterpretedPastTense exception thrown

zwzsg wrote:Message subject: A solution to modders infighting.
From: zwzsg
Sent at: Wed Jun 06, 2007 1:09 pm
To: Tobi




First, I will assume that you want Spring to be an open RTS engine platform, supporting various games. If instead you're happy with just B.A., then what I'll say become irrelevant and I'll have to look for another place.

There's always been some tension between different minded modders, but lately it seem to have burst a little more visibly (ok that was weeks ago, but I have slow reaction times): Caydr getting banned, Fang leaving, BA & AA bashing threads popping up everywhere, etc...

My theory is that it comes from a lack of perceived recognition of modders. And I have a very simple solution for that:
Give each mod its own subforum!

Currently, mods have to have all posts about them clumped into a single thread. Which presents the following problems:

• When you must find back a precise info in a 500 posts thread, well, it's nigh impossible. 500 is not a made up number, Kernel Panic thread has 545 posts, BattleTech threads has 424 posts, WD 872 posts, EE 721 posts, etc... Each clumped into a single thread, a giant mass of unorganised data.
• Whenever a mod thread stop being bumped, it quickly sink into oblivion. Doesn't matter if the mod is great or reached perfection, it just disappears out of view.
• This makes threads such as "hai, can U maek me a star trek mod" have as much importance than EE or 1944 mod threads, which is just plain wrong.
• This prevent any kind of organisation, and this prevent splitting different discussion about the same mod into different topics: a mod might need one topic to discuss the long term goals, one topic to discuss the lastest added unit, one topic about a newfound bug, but when all is in same thread, you've got unrelated conversations interweaving, which just doesn't work. Of course, you could create seperate topics for each aspect of a mod, but if you do that, not only you get flamed by people not caring about that particular mod, but also, when you need at a later time to find back what was said, if it's not in the one official thread about that mod, and lost amongst all the thread of Spring, well, good luck finding it, even with forum search engine.
• But, mostly, this conveys the impression mods are not worthy of nothing more than a passing forum thread, which is downright degradating.

Many modding team have already left the Spring board, and set home on varied other forums, for instance, SWS, BattleTech, half of 1944, and half of Epic Legion is at TAUniverse forum, Expand & Exterminate, Nanoblobs, the other half of Epic Legion, and a couple more are at Smoth's forum, XTA and Simbase are at wolfgame, Balanced Annihilation are at Unknown-Files forum, capspring at its own site, etc...

This proves that mods really needs subforums.

You might think "well, they found a host already elsewhere, they don't need Spring forum" but that is not true:

• About nobody can check that many forums regularly. But if they were all in the same place, then it would be easy to check the lastest forums posts of all mods at once.
• Very few people knows the very existence of all those forums. If I was a player wanting to report an issue with 1944, how the hell could you expect me to know https://1944.bountysource.com is the place to?
• You had to create varied stickies telling people "to discuss AA, do not post here but there", "to discuss XTA, do not post here but there", this clearly indicates people would expect mod discussions to be hosted at Spring's forum.
• They miss the potential potentialisation effect. In a lone forum a lack of activity is immediatly apparent, so it doesn't get checked that often, so has less post and replies, and so less and less until it dries out and die. The same forum in the midst of a buzzing community get checked more easily so more casually, so get more post and replies,...
• What I mean, is that if all mod subforum were on the same place, people from different mods will check and help each other.
• For the casual visitor, all the activity hosted at other site is unseen. All he'll saw is the Spring mod subforum, with a couple joke mods and contentless threads. But he wouldn't even suspect all those large mods activity on remote places.

You might think it's best to keep mod forum on separate site, so they can have serious discussion between only people who cares, and not be trolled by rival modders or random bored Springites, but this is not true. Of course when creating a subforum for a mod, you must give the author some moderatorship over that forum. Not full supermod power, off course, just basic power to close, split, stick, edit, delete threads, to delete, move, edit, posts, etc... Avoid dangerous powers such as ban or stealth edit, and off course make it clear they have no special status outside their own subforum. The combination of having to post into an area clearly labelled mod X subforum, and that subforum being moderated by mod author, ensure the followings:

• Whenever someone post there, he knows he's not on neutral ground, but on that mod territory. This already make him more likely to behave well.
• Whenever someone trolls, flames, or other disruption, the mod author, being subforum moderator, can immediatly act. Yes, currently we have some forum wide moderator that are supposed to do that job, however, they might not notice every post, they might not care, they might feel it was a harmless or well-deserved troll, etc...
• Also, for stuff like editing thread title to make it more clear, splitting discussion, sticky stuff, anything that involve just organising stuff and not "moderating" people, it gets very inconvenient to call a mod everytime you need something done, and much more convenient to be given the power to do it yourself at your leisure.
• Oh, and I don't mean to imply current Spring forum mods don't do a good job, but you have to agree that people decicated to a particular mod would do a better job at moderating a subforum about it that general purpose moderator. (Kinda annoying that "mod" means both "forum moderator" and "game package", eh?)

For instance, if Absolute Annihilation had its subforum, then no one would complain when Caydr create 3 thread for any decision he might or might not consider for AA future. And then Smoth wouldn't be able to troll it since he would have to post in a sub-area under the juridiction of Caydr, etc... And vice-versa, of course.


Now let's address the issue of who to give a mod subforum to. Obviously, you can't give one to anybody who request one, or we'll end up with a hundred empty forum in no time. So, only mods that are worthy should get one. And assessing whether a mod or not is worthy of having a subforum is a very subjective thing. Yet there are some telltalkes that don't lie. If the thread about a mod is over ten pages long, then it's worth it. If there was an alpha or beta released, then it's worth it. If they showned proof of progress, such as w.i.p. models screenshots, if the author keeps updating after a month or two, etc... So while the precise limit after which a mod is worthy of a subforum is subjective, for most of the time it's clear enough. I mean, for a random exemple, this, not worthy, that, worthy, not doubt about it.

If a mod stays dead for a long time, before even reaching the beta stage, then don't hesite to remove its subforum. Have some clear rule, like, if zero post (not counting spam and bump) in 6 month, forum gets axed, then enforce it. But whenever you remove a subforum, don't outright delete it, just move it to a graveyard subforum, somewhere remote in the forum tree. So if the mod becomes active again, you can move it back to the list of active mods forums.


Even if in general I have dislike for TA based mods, especially those that comes with no new models but only FBI stats change, I think that in all fairness TA-based mods should be able to get their own subforum. After all it's not only the mod intrasec value, but the amount of forumers replies and forum activity it'll generate, that motivate giving it a subforum.


You shouldn't create mod subforum without the mod author consent. And right now, with all the history, some modders might be be keen on the idea of moving back to Spring board. So I think the best approach is to set subforums for a couple mod that'll have no problem getting their subforum here, for instance, Kernel Panic! :D And then, after a while, upon seeing those mods gets lots of visits and feedbacks by having their own subforums at Spring's, I'm confident other modders, even those adverse to the idea, will one by one ask you to get a subforum. Just like in the old time some hosted site kept swinging from and to Planet Annihilation and TAUniverse, depending on which seemed to be the hottest place to be at the moment.




Ideally, you'll give each mod not only a subforum, but a whole subsite, for file hosting, image gallery, etc... However:

• Spring's server space and bandwidth isn't infinite, and can't accomodate everything.
• This would requires lots of admin work, and the less the better.
• In our days and ages, frankly, static websites are becoming a thing of the past! It's all about building community, and other web2.0 buzzwords now!
• For files, they have Unknown-Files, for gallery, they have photobucket, flickr, and another dozen free image host, for writing manuals, there's Spring wiki, ... so a website that most modders won't care to update is really not nedded.

So in practice, full hosted site isn't needed, just a forum is enough.


So, to sum it up, change the Spring forum hierachy, so that:

• You keep the general "mod" forum.
• At the top of it, you have subforum for each mod
• The last one is a graveyard forum which in turn contains dead mod forums (but no need to create it until you got some dead mod forums already).

I know in vbb it takes about a minute to create a subforum and assign it a moderator, I guess it's about the same in phbb, so overally this would require very little work for you, yet could have a huge impact on Spring's future.

AF wrote:

was going to happen anyway

Code: Select all

error: TobiMisinterpretedPastTense exception thrown

May I suggest we split the mods forum into mods and TA based mods? Among other merges and splits, and a renaming of the svn forum to the git forum or version control?

AF wrote:We know what needs doing and that installer change was going to happen anyway, I and other have been nattering on about it for years now.

The developers have the means to settle this, but the necessary steps have not been taken or the interest shown.

adin_panther wrote:... they want to relaunch Alone in the Dark. Sure.

AF wrote:Obvious problems such as an svn forum when we're using git not svn,

Subversion & Git repositories

Use and structure of the svn and git repositories.